Eggs with fishy taste!

[Cred]

Omega-3 tastes like fish (Fish, flaxseed, and eggs high in omega-3 all taste like fish) or perhaps it's just fish tastes like omega-3.
Interesting about the Reds but this affects more than just chickens. But the root cause is the omega-3 level of the eggs, whether that means the Reds produce the highest levels of omega-3s in their eggs- it is due to their diet, either foraging or flaxseed or fish meal in their feed. Free ranging birds have higher levels of omega-3 because they're foraging, as well as hens feed flaxseed to increase the O3s. My ducks are affected too. When they are foraging more of their food, I get several, but not all, of these and they are strong and off-putting. But not all of the eggs are affected and not for all of the foraging season. Omega-3 levels of eggs vary greatly, from breed to breed, season to season and even among flockmates.

 

[ChickenMan1111]

Sorry for posting the same thing to so many places, but I wanted those who are searching for this topic to find an answer sooner than the time it took me! Great thanks to Dragon16 for posting the research results. I searched for the main words in her informative post and got the link I posted below.

When you are losing egg customers, and being frustrated by your own breakfast, the desperate searches pull up lots of questions with few definitive answers. Most are saying flax seed and cruciferous plants like broccoli and mustard families, but they don't tell why, and some of us were never feeding those things anyway. Apparently this report explains the problem is limited to brown egg layers like Rhode Island Red types, production red varieties and Barred Rocks, some of whom may have a mutation that prevents their digestive system from producing trimethylamine OXIDASE, which breaks down the fishy trimethylamine substance in other breeds. I read a good deal of the report, not all, but enough to know that they claim some brown-egg-laying hens will produce a slightly fishy egg without being fed any of the suspected omega rich feeds, so they may be getting something in our yard weeds that breaks down in a similar fashion to produce the stinky compound.

I will now be scouring my yard for mustard type weeds and canola-looking plants. I want my lamb's quarters and pigweed to flourish, but I may need to fence them off or try to transplant them to a restricted spot and fence that off. My husband is so sensitive to the fishy smell that it puts him completely off his breakfast. He hates having to break eggs in a separate bowl and then sniff them, and then fork the yolk just to make sure and sniff that! He's on a completely different schedule than the rest of us. I told him we had gotten no stinky green eggs yet, so he limited himself to those, and the rest of us had to do the sniff test! Now I know why the green eggs and the white eggs have never been stinky! They don't have the mutation! We were getting maybe 3 or 4 fishy eggs/day out of a dozen brown layers at the worst point. I read somewhere that Lohmans have developed a strain of brown egg-layers that don't have the mutation since the study came out. That would be interesting.

The link in my previous post was for Dragon16's comment midway of the page. The following link is for the paper I found on the research for that subject. https://www.aecl.org/assets/RD-files/Outputs-2/DAQ-303AA-Final-Report.pdf (titled: Elimination of fishy taint in eggs from hens fed diets containing canola meal) God bless.

 

[ChickenMan1111]

Hi Ugadano,
I'd like to read the report you linked but the link doesn't work.
Can you please supply an active link to the report about the genetic defect of some breeds not breaking down and deodorizing the Omega 3 ?
Thank you very much,
DeAsUnJa

 

[Foreveryukon]

Dragon 16 posted this: "I've had the same problem. In doing research, it's a genetic defect in a brown egg laying hen that causes the "fishy" smell and taste. It's called trimethylamine and it's when the hen ingests, canola, flaxseed or rapeseed. Choline chloride which is in most feed will not produce the fishy smell.(or at least diminish it) . I give my dogs the fishy eggs and they don't seem to mind. Rhode Island Reds and Barred Plymouth Rocks may have tis defect."
(thread link https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/635753/fishy-smelling-egg#post_13960542 )

I wonder if it is something like ragweed or pigweed, lamb's quarter or what? Here's my post from another thread, just copied and pasted here as my experience with fishy eggs:

So frustrating having that smell/taste and not knowing what to do about it. I ask every chicken person I come to, even the county extension agents, nobody knows. We had chickens years ago, kept them in the next neighbor's old henhouse across the fence and free ranged in our yard and the pasture. Every year during the growing season, we'd get a couple of hens laying fishy eggs. I mean picked up fresh-laid same-day, not even hot days, and bring them in to crack in the pan and the smell would nearly blow you away! We had to have 3 bowls out. One to crack into then pick up and smell of it. At one point I couldn't smell the fishy unless I forked the yolk and smelled of it that way, and that's not good if you wanted them fried sunnyside up. 2nd bowl on hand for if the first one received a stinky egg, because even the remaining moisture from the white of the first would taint the next one. At that point, 1st bowl became the dump bowl for 'fishy'. 2nd bowl would have to be thoroughly rinsed out if it got a fishy egg. 3rd bowl for putting 'safe' eggs in to scramble or for mixing in baked goods recipe. The fishy egg would ruin a cake or pancakes!
After the growing season ended, no more fishy eggs until next late spring. I thought there must be some bug in the henhouse litter that they were getting, but never found anything, and finally decided there must be some weed growing that they were eating. But all my hens free range in my large yard, and I would only have 2 or maybe 3 out of over a dozen hens with that fishy smell. If even one egg was fishy, it would ruin a dozen in the scramble pan. I peeled a hardboiled egg the other day and the white tasted fine but I couldn't eat the yolk due to the fish taste. I am not afraid of their safety, as I know my eggs are fresh, but I had customers in the past and I would warn them to crack in separate bowls and smell them. I would make them good next time if they got fishy eggs. But after a while it's embarrassing and customers drop off. At this point with my hens, none of my green shells have been fishy, only a brown, so I think it's my production reds, and when one went broody and stopped laying, we didn't get any more fishy for quite some time.
The fishy egg has no visible difference, no cloudy appearance, but in some you can smell it as soon as you crack the egg. In others, as I mentioned before, it would have no odor until I broke the yolk with a fork, and even a hint of fishy would ruin the scrambled dozen if it got in there without me noticing! I have eaten them before, forced myself with picante or something to mask the odor because I was so reluctant to waste anything, no problems with an intestinal nature, but I just can't do it again!
I am not feeding them onion or garlic, fishy smell occurred long before I bought oyster shell, which doesn't stink, and they ALL eat that. I feed milo and whole oats and they free range. My family has corn allergy which is why we don't feed that and why we wanted our own chickens. I used to feed wheat that was grown just down the road, but not with my latest bunch of chickens We went probably 6 years without our own chickens and have started back with them again, now we have our own small henhouse in our yard and the hens don't go across the fence. Whatever it is they are getting, it's in my yard.

i looked it up as a friend that buys my eggs said they taste fishy and its omega fatty acids feeding them canola.flax seeds or sometimes lettuce can make them taste fishy. they are actually better for you than the other eggs as they have more omega in them. there is nothing wrong with them and its usually brown eggs that have the "problem" so with brown egg laying hens, you just have to watch what you feed them. I only have 1 customer that mentions the smell, the others never do. my husband said he's noticed but just disregards. so they are not "bad" the hens just have a problem processing the omegas and it comes out in their eggs